Why is this work relevant for Direct?

We directly targeted online news readers to get them to switch from scanning the news to actually taking up a subscription with The Times. We did this by teasing them with a compelling story that was only available to subscription users. This was helped by the fact that all our rivals ran with our Times exclusive on JFK too!

Background

Situation : The Times was seen as a paper with a narrow mindset. This wasn’t actually true.
The Times prides itself on having many differing opinions and voices on any particular story.
Brief : Help launch the Times ‘Find your voice campaign’ to its readers and potential readers around the world.
Objectives : Reposition The Times as a paper that represents many differing voices.

Describe the creative idea

When JFK was assassinated on 22/11/63 he was on his way to give an important speech at the Dallas Trade Mart. Now, 100 years after his birth, he finally gets to make it.
The Dallas Trade Mart Speech is a world first, an AI audio speech made completely out of data from hundreds of archive recordings of old JFK speeches.
This breakthrough technique involves smart splicing small phonetic fragments of speech - typically around 250,000 individual segments, down to 3 milliseconds in duration to allow JFK to finally deliver the best speech never heard.

Describe the strategy

The Times campaign ‘find your voice’ aims to help people to find their voice through the news and opinions put forward by the Newspaper. Using tech to help millions of readers find the voice of one of the most respected Presidents in these unusual times felt like the perfect way to launch the campaign. Our strategy was to find a relevant story that could reflect our brand idea ‘find your voice’ and then let PR bring it to as many of our and our rivals readers as we could.

Describe the execution

The Dallas Trade Mart Speech is a world first, an AI audio speech made completely out of data from hundreds of archive recordings of old JFK speeches.
This breakthrough technique involves smart splicing small phonetic fragments of speech - typically around 250,000 individual segments, down to 3 milliseconds in duration to allow JFK to finally deliver the best speech never heard. We ran the story on the front page of the Times and over the next week we reached over 1 billion media impressions as our rivals around the world picked up our story and ran with it.